On Sunday, December 28th, 17-year-old trans* Ohio teenager committed suicide by stepping in front of a tractor-trailer on the interstate. She was killed instantly.

Her tragedy says something profound which has been almost completely missed in the discussion about LGBT-inclusive education and Gay-Straight Alliances (GSAs) currently wafting across Canada.

Before Leelah Alcorn’s death, she posted a suicide note online. Some of the links to it are no longer working, but the text is archived at Slate. In it, she relates a heartbreaking story of a kid who learned what “transgender” meant at the age of 14, despite having always known in her heart that she needed to live as a young woman. [This I can strongly relate to, having not heard anything about trans* people until I was about the same age or slightly older. It was an age before Internet. I wept for days at the realization that there was actually a word for it — until then, I thought I was the only one, and that it was a character fault.] On telling her parents, they called it a phase, said it was impossible (that “God doesn’t make mistakes”), and taking her to Christian therapists, who told her that she “was selfish and wrong and… should look to God for help.” The situation grew worse:

“So they took me out of public school, took away my laptop and phone, and forbid me of getting on any sort of social media, completely isolating me from my friends. This was probably the part of my life when I was the most depressed, and I’m surprised I didn’t kill myself. I was completely alone for 5 months. No friends, no support, no love. Just my parent’s disappointment and the cruelty of loneliness…”

She felt like everything was closing in on her: her social isolation, the hopelessness of having to afford a mass of expenses (college, moving away from home and transition costs including surgery), what she perceived to be an insurmountable challenge of being too masculinized by hormones by the time she can start transition at 18 (a tragic misconception, as transition outlooks are still usually extremely good when transitioning that young), the fear of living a loveless life, and more.

Since her suicide, her parents have received a wave of anger from trans* people, and responded by claiming to have loved their child “unconditionally,” while still adamantly invalidating her and misgendering her:

“We don’t support that, religiously … But we told him that we loved him unconditionally. We loved him no matter what. I loved my son. People need to know that I loved him. He was a good kid, a good boy.”

The media coverage has turned into a circus, with various publications conflicting and editorializing over whether Leelah should be acknowledged as the person she understood herself to be or deliberately invalidated as per the family’s wishes. Meanwhile, the religious right response has been unsurprisingly vicious and negative, blaming trans* people for Leelah’s suicide, and that the real solution should have been more antagonism, reparative therapy, and invalidation until it somehow eventually overwhelmed her and somehow (inexplicably) made her feel better:

“The attitude that says we should be able to be what we want, no matter what, is dangerous. This Abby is complicit in her friend’s death. She encouraged wrong behavior. This wrong behavior created bad feelings or depression. This furthered Joshua’s depression and desire to make himself happy.

“Rather than saying gently and calmly that his problem was not that he was a girl trapped in a boy’s body, they should have said. “You’re a boy, in a boy’s body.” The confusion is that you are trying to be something that you are not meant to be, you’re not a girl…”

Others are calling for all trans* people to go “truck” themselves (i.e. commit suicide in the same fashion that Leelah did).

Since her suicide, vigils for Leelah have taken place across North America, including one in Winnipeg. Trans* activists are calling for a change in the discussion about the well-being of trans* youth.

With the extensive (and puzzling) debate over LGBT-inclusive education and Gay-Straight Alliances (GSAs) in several provinces across Canada, there has been a considerable amount of ink spilled over a parent’s rights to deny their children information about sexual orientation and gender identity, and to deny the acceptance, validation and support of gay, bi- or trans* kids in schools as a matter of religious freedom of conscience.

And yet no one is talking about LGBT teens’ rights to acceptance, enfranchisement, freedom from harassment, and to learn about who they are. Or the right of non-queer teens to learn what society now largely knows to be truth about their peers.

In Alberta, the debate has even gone as far as enfranchising parents’ rights in a way that supersedes the rights of children and teens, in law.

Canadian school boards have begun recognizing the need to enfranchise lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans* kids. But will politicians and media do the same before Leelah Alcorn’s tragedy is repeated north of the 49th parallel?

There is a simple, time-honoured rule about attempting to “balance” human rights classes in legislation so that it works out a particular way every time, and it goes like this:

You can’t.

That is a court’s role. When two human rights classes are put into conflict in a way that creates hardships for both, a court becomes the arbiter, weighing the context of a given situation in order to determine which party has experienced the most undue hardship.

Legislating such a way that one party’s rights always supersedes the other creates a hierarchy of rights, and defeats the whole purpose of equal rights legislation.

Bill 10

That is what took place this week with Alberta’s Bill 10, which newly-crowned Premier Jim Prentice introduced to dump and replace Liberal MLA Laurie Blakeman’s Bill 202.

The latter bill sought to do three things:

Give students the right to form Gay-Straight Alliances (GSAs) when and if they wanted to;

Remove a section (s.11.1) of the Alberta Human Rights Act which called for parents to be notified and either evacuate their children or opt them into anything that taught tolerance of LGBT people (interesting trivia: Alberta is the only jurisdiction in the world that has a “parental rights” clause like this, and it took several years to implement because no one was sure how it could work); and

Add a mention of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms and the Alberta Human Rights Act to the Education Act.

Premier Prentice’s new Bill 10 does this:

Encourages school boards to allow GSAs;

Allow the students to sue the school boards if they don’t (presuming they can find enough legal help, information, support and funding to cover the legal expenses to do so, and ride out the years of delay tactics at boards’ disposal);

The bill also removes s.11.1 from the Alberta Human Rights Act, but makes changes to legislation which more or less negates the change, other than affecting the way complaints are addressed.

If at any point the Premier thought he had sliced through a Gordian Knot worthy of Alexander, he soon realized otherwise. As the bill came up for Third Reading, several amendments were proposed by opposition MLAs, and Prentice is now said to also be considering some of his own.

There are two central conflicts within this debate, one that is discussed frequently during many debates on social issues, and another which has been barely remarked upon at all.

“LGBT Rights vs. Religious Freedom”

The first is the false equivalence between LGBT human rights and religious freedom. The reason I call it a false equivalence is because what we’re really talking about is the complaint that the (“special,” as it’s sometimes called) right of lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans* people to have equal access to employment, housing, services and other forms of enfranchisement is trumping the (“perfectly ordinary everyday?”) right to deny LGBT people any or all of those things. People retain the freedom to believe what they will, practice their faith, and speak their beliefs — all up to the point where doing so becomes harassing and disenfranchising to others. In most of the situations that are framed as pitting LGBT rights against religious freedom, this sort of conflict can only be considered equally-matched if you believe that coexistence is a violation religious conscience.

But the “gay rights versus religious freedom” argument has been losing steam, partly because the public at large is starting to recognize it as a ruse, and partly because the cause of religious freedom opens the possibility that the proponents’ religion will be placed on an equal footing with other religions, such as Islam, Satanism, or even Atheism. Hardline social conservatives like the American Family Association’s Bryan Fischer have spoken out about this within religious circles, and more are starting to follow.

Consider this candid rant by Scott Lively, the pastor who is widely credited with having inspired Uganda’s Anti-Homosexuality Act and Russia’s ban on “gay propaganda”:

“For about a year now I’ve been arguing against the use of “religious liberty” as a theme of Christian public advocacy. We retreated to that theme after SCOTUS Justice Hugo Black’s abandonment of the Bible’s authority in favor of a new “religious pluralism” standard in the 1940s-60s, starting with Everson v Board of Education (1947). That was the case that adopted Jefferson’s “separation of church and state” metaphor as a justification for declaring all religions to be equal with Christianity in America, and equally subservient to Secular Humanist authority…

“But God always provides a way of escape. (We’re only trapped if we accept the limitation of staying on their chessboard.) That narrow and difficult but God-honoring way is to stop arguing for “religious liberty” and resume our proclamation of the superiority of Christ and His Word over all opposing faiths (along with tolerance for people of other faiths — that‘s how it worked before Black). It’s goal must be nothing less than an official reaffirmation of the Bible as our legal and cultural foundation, which would require overturning Everson and its juridical progeny…”

It was never really about religious freedom.

“Parental Rights”

The other conflict that has been almost completely missed is the one between youth and parents. The argument made for parental rights clauses is that parents should have (using the language of Bill 10) the right “to make informed decisions respecting the education of their children.”

No one was ever stopping parents from teaching their children what they believe and encouraging their kids to follow their lead. What parental rights are actually about is the right to deny their children any information to the contrary.

And that only sounds like a good idea until you remember that the kids should have rights too. But by enshrining parental rights in legislation, the Province of Alberta is essentially prioritizing the right of parents to deny their kids knowledge (and emotional support, if their kid happens to be gay or trans*) over the right of children and youth to know. In some cases, it means that the attitudes of the narrowest-minded parents determine what everyone’s kids are allowed to know.

And when you say it for what it is, it doesn’t really sound like that brilliant a compromise.

On October 13th, a story appeared at the Christian Broadcasting Network about girls being harassed by a trans youth in the washroom of a Colorado-area school. Soon afterward, the story was picked up by the Daily Mail, the Examiner, FOX News, and several webmedia outlets. One even embellished it with a claim that the girls were threatened with hate crime charges). After a few years of using the spectre of a fabled bathroom predator to scare people about the prospect of human rights law inclusion for trans people, it almost seemed like the far right was clapping with glee at finally having found one.

Except that it wasn’t true.

Almost immediately after the story broke, it was debunked, and some media — including the Daily Mail and the Examiner — had retracted it. This was because Transadvocate’s Cristan Williams contacted Superintendent Rhonda Vendetti, and was told that:

“This is one parent basically bringing their viewpoint about this situation to the media because they weren’t getting the responses that they hoped they would get from the district, from parents of students at the high school, or from the board and myself. So I think it’s just an attempt to elevate the situation to a point where maybe some more attention can be drawn to that in the hope of having a different outcome. But to our knowledge and based on our investigation, none of those things have actually happened. We do have a transgender student at the high school and she has been using the women’s restroom. There has not been a situation.”

That hasn’t stopped the story from spreading like wildfire, including at least one Canadian far-right website. With Bill C-279 proposing to add gender identity to Canadian human rights legislation now winding its way back through the Senate, it will almost certainly come up again.

CBN’s report originated with a far-right ex-gay group called the Pacific Justice Institute (PJI), a group which has been actively fighting against a recently-passed law in California, AB 1266, which provides protections and accommodation for trans students. Along with several other anti-LGBT groups, PJI is trying to mount up a petition effort similar to the Proposition 8 campaign, to put this law on the ballot and ultimately repeal it.

JPI is continuing to insist that the student in question (who is not being named) was harassing other girls in the washroom.

“It is our position that the intrusion of a biological male into a restroom for teenage girls is inherently intimidating and harassing…”

Transadvocate has continued to document PJI’s changing talking points and positions and grilled the group’s spokesman, staff attorney Matthew McReynolds, in an interview. From these, we discover that PJI’s statements on the issue involve a lot of playing with language, such as using the fact that the student has recently started transition (and is therefore in that awkward phase in which her gender expression is interpreted differently by different people) to claim that she appears sometimes as female and sometimes as male — as though she’s switching back and forth at whim.

TA also interviewed the family of the teen at the centre of the controversy, to finally get her side of the story. Not surprisingly, it turns out that she has been the target of threats since the controversy first began. But it’s not all bad news, either. Several schoolmates and their families have stood up for the student, as well:

A female student from Florence High School who wished to remain anonymous said “[PJI is] so pathetic. My mom asked me about this whole thing when she saw it on the news, and I told her. She even said they were being dramatic.”

In a printed letter to the editor in the town’s local paper, the Canon City Daily Record, a woman named Dara Hoffman-Fox wrote to say, “This is a local teenager whose life has been turned upside down by just a few people who fear what they do not know.” The letter went on to say that PJI’s story “has since been proven false and media outlets around the world are providing apologies for having printed [false accusations] without having the facts confirmed. Sadly, the damage is done.”

Additionally, the students of Florence High School have organized their own group to support [name withheld].

And transphobic groups are starting to follow that lead, and portray any instance in which trans women in womens’ spaces as being harassment or disturbing people, regardless of whether or not the person in question actually did anything.

(Previously published in March 2012, and archived here for when it might be needed as reference)

Several in the Canadian media and the general public have become interested in trans youth. It’s probably inevitable that many opinions and emotions have circulated as a result. I’m concerned that some of the attention surrounding trans youth and kids is distorted by the (perhaps unintentional) omission of some important distinctions.

The medical profession has long recognized that gender dysphoria often first occurs in youth and childhood, and formalized this in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM-III) in 1980 with a specific diagnosis for adolescents. Treatment at that time often took the form of aversion-type therapies, but because these seemed to result in increased distress and self-harm (and not unusually transition in adulthood, anyway) it became necessary for that treatment to be rethought. As years passed, it became increasingly obvious that when there is a strong gender identity issue, undergoing puberty to become a sex that one does not feel is appropriate to them can have a tremendous negative toll on a youth’s emotional well-being. That puberty is also accompanied by major body changes, some of which could be impossible to overcome in adulthood, if that person inevitably transitions.

It’s important to recognize that the process for trans youth that I’m speaking of is not “sex change” and surgery. This is often the conclusion that people jump to, but the reality is that newer treatments merely delay puberty until it is certain whether further changes like hormone therapy must be undertaken… typically after age 14. German singer Kim Petras is thought to be the first youth to have undergone surgery at the age of 16, in 2009. Since then, a youth in the U.K. has done so as well, and there was an unconfirmed rumour that someone in Europe had full GRS at age 14, but surgery at this age is very rare, if it occurs. By the time this decision is made, a teen has typically had several years of living as their identified gender to determine if the decision is right for them.

Youth transition does not start simply because a child wants to crossdress on occasion or because they like dolls or trucks. It happens when there is a strong and persistent identification that clearly indicates that there is something deeper than the usual experimentation phase which most kids go through. If a child or youth exhibits a clear and persistent identification to express themselves as a gender contrary to their birth sex, in an obvious 24/7 manner, then arrangements are made to allow the child to live accordingly. Although this social transition and accommodation in schools is gleaning much of the attention, the fact is that accommodation is really not a new phenomenon.

What is new is the use of puberty-delaying drugs, which is credited as having been pioneered by Dr. Norman Spack, at the Children’s Hospital Gender Management Services Clinic in Boston, in 2007. If accommodation proves to be an appropriate way to alleviate emotional distress, parents and doctors might then consider pharmacologically delaying the effects of testosterone or estrogen which would otherwise typically trigger puberty. Even at this stage, everything is reversible, in the event that a youth changes their mind. It isn’t until hormone therapies are started that changes occur, and that generally happens after there has been much time to consider the consequences, and the youth is able to make a mature and informed decision.

As these stories break, it is sometimes alleged that parents and medical professionals are participating some kind of agenda which might influence youth to become trans. Yet the objective of transition is to do what is necessary in order for a person to be at peace with themselves — sometimes that doesn’t include surgery, and doesn’t necessarily follow a specific formula, but is for the individual to determine. Likewise, trans-inclusive equality and anti-bullying education does not “encourage” someone to become trans (unless they’ve already been experiencing a gender identity conflict in a persistent way). Instead, it acknowledges in an age-appropriate way that trans people do exist, and are deserving of the same respect afforded to anyone else. This is for the benefit of those trans youth who do exist — either openly or in hiding — and who need to know that they are not alone, nor are they “freaks” of some kind.

The same is typically true of parents and medical professionals, who usually don’t come to a decision to assist a child to transition very easily. Parents and doctors who form a transitioning youth’s support network ARE very much thinking about the needs of the child when they make that wracking of a decision.

National Public Radio (NPR, a semi-public broadcaster in the U.S.) previously compared aversion and affirming practices. People wanting to know more should read the contrasting accounts told in this piece.

This is part of a 3-part series on LGBT-inclusive anti-bullying education, centering around the Day of Silence, which encourages students to take a vow of silence for the day, to bring attention to anti-LGBT bullying and harassment. It occurs on April 20th.

Part 1: When even silence offends: on the 2012 push from the North American far-right to subvert and antagonize Day of Silence participants.and: When even silence “persecutes:” on the ongoing conflicts in Canada, and a new game of declaring “homophobia” a hate word.

Part 2: When even silence can be exploited: on how the far right’s “No Pro Homo” policy has been tried before.and: When even silence “indoctrinates:” on why the failure of “No Pro Homo” doesn’t register as a failure in the mind of the far right.

Part 3: When even silence fails: on the need for affirmation.

Anoka-Hennepin: the No Pro Homo model.

In 1995, Minnesota’s largest educational region — the Anoka-Hennepin School District — adopted a “no pro homo” policy (sometimes called “no promo homo”) which asserted that homosexuality would “not be taught/addressed as a normal, valid lifestyle and that the district staff and their resources not advocate the homosexual lifestyle.” This was to appease far-right social conservatives (who should not be confused for all Christians, even though they often attempt to portray homophobic views as representative of the whole — when I write about the mindset concerned here, it’s a particular kind of mindset which justifies, and even that is a generalization).

In 1998, the district hired a part-time music teacher who was discovered to have transitioned from male to female. Conservative parents launched a massive “Parents in Touch” campaign to have her fired and the Minnesota Family Council even launched an initiative to have a human rights law that protected gay and trans people repealed, but the extreme nature of the rhetoric surrounding the campaign also turned off a significant number of other parents and area residents. The teacher resigned, but tensions resulted in the envelope being pushed back and forth until a 2002 attempt to replace an LGBT affirming poster with one advocating reparative “ex-gay” therapy led to the district formulating its now infamous “neutrality” policy. Continue reading →

This is part of a 3-part series on LGBT-inclusive anti-bullying education, centering around the Day of Silence, which encourages students to take a vow of silence for the day, to bring attention to anti-LGBT bullying and harassment. It occurs on April 20th.

Part 1: When even silence offends: on the 2012 push from the North American far-right to subvert and antagonize Day of Silence participants.and: When even silence “persecutes:” on the ongoing conflicts in Canada, and a new game of declaring “homophobia” a hate word.

Part 2: When even silence can be exploited: on how the far right’s “No Pro Homo” policy has been tried before.and: When even silence “indoctrinates:” on why the failure of “No Pro Homo” doesn’t register as a failure in the mind of the far right.

Part 3: When even silence fails: on the need for affirmation.

It boils down to affirmation. Beneath all the rhetoric, the issue is not about speech or parental rights, but about fears that affirmation might enable or “encourage” someone to be gay or trans.

When I attended school, there was every reason for me to believe that the core of who I was would make me a target. At that time, we didn’t really understand what transsexuality was — I hadn’t even heard the word until I was around twelve, and when I did I ran to my bedroom and wept for hours at the realization that if there was a word for it, then I wasn’t the only one. The next day, I went to the library and sought out the “authority” on transsexualism… who at that time was Janice Raymond, so that messed me up for another several years.

Affirmation? Hell, I was alone in a school and a church that taught me that I and everyone like me was pure evil. As much as I tried to “man up” and hide, I was inevitably target — usually labeled a “fag” or a “gimp” or a “homo” rather than anything about being trans (hey, it was the mid-1980s), but a target nonetheless.

“And there’s another way that I was bullied that I would like to mention, because I haven’t heard people talk about it, but I feel it’s just as bad as being beat up. Although that happened to me a couple of times too. And that is bullying by ostracism: when they separate you from the pack, and no one talks to you. And they give you the cold shoulder. And you’re suddenly not somebody who is welcome in the group. I remember that hurting me very much. To my core….”

It was the devastation of being so completely alone, isolated and incompatible with the rest of the planet that was the worst of it. Alone-ness. It’s the isolating effect of being targeted… and that, more than the bullying itself, is devastating. That’s what I couldn’t bear. If I had felt I wasn’t completely alone, the rest probably wouldn’t have mattered as much.

As we’ve already seen, the U.S. and Canadian far-right see being gay or trans as a choice, that kids aren’t any of those things to begin with and that affirmation and support simply encourage sinful decision-making. Yet my own experience showed me that being trans was present in my life right from the beginning, was never something I could switch on or off like a light, and knowing that it was some taboo subject that dare not speak its name was an incredibly isolating and suffocating experience. I wrote previously about the need to affirm LGBT students:

… kids absolutely do have a right to be affirmed as people, no matter how they might identify themselves. I say that as someone who recognizes that children and teens are complex but rational, far from the helpless victims we tend to see them as, and very often far more mature than we give them credit for. I personally do not subscribe to the “heads as empty vessels theory” that postulates that they just accept anything that we put in there. Underlying the fear of orientation and gender identity -inclusive sex education is a belief that kids are vulnerable to ”recruiting,” which is an argument that only works if you believe that kids have no will of their own and that one’s sexuality is entirely a choice – my experience tells me otherwise on both counts.

One thing I do know is that we experience life – and particularly emotion – much more intensely when we’re young. And in a society that is still so entirely pervasive with homophobic and transphobic attitudes, disenfranchisements and signals, the absence of affirmation of students’ right to seek identity and claim the one that fits them becomes a suffocating vacuum of fear of stepping outside the rules that police gender and orientation, thus inviting wrath. It’s a literal hell to live through.

The mere absence of bullying — assuming that any policy could actually guarantee it in real life — is not going to accomplish an environment where kids are able to live and breathe and find the freedom to become people functioning at their fullest potential.

That’s why support is vital. That’s why it’s crucial for LGBT and allied kids to be able to form Gay-Straight Alliances and form communities of their own without shame and without the educational institution sanctioning antagonism against their attempts to do so. Especially for those kids who don’t have that kind of lifeline at home. In enforcing that No Pro Homo environment, parents are isolating kids, forcing them to withdraw into themselves, instilling into them the belief that they are all alone in their struggles.

Parents will and do teach their kids. They will and do pass on their attitudes about homosexuality and transsexuality (contrary to claims that things like the Day of Silence will silence them). So be it. Speech isn’t the issue, here. The issue is whether parents have the right to ensure that their children are sheltered from any and all contradictory beliefs that might allow them to form their own opinions and develop critical thinking for themselves. The issue is whether those parents have the right to prevent school administration from providing safe haven or support from this kind of bullying for LGBT kids, in the name of their religious freedom and their rights as parents.

When even silent protest is seen as “indoctrination, just promoting homosexuality and transgenderism,” certainly anything that acknowledges that LGBT people exist and dares to affirm their right to be — rather than assailing them as aberrant abominations, “sexual deviants” and demon-possessed — is apparently unacceptable. And this is how the far right (again, not to be confused with all those of any particular faith) does its level best to enforce or at least shelter the practice of bullying LGBT youth, rather than end it.

Meanwhile

Meanwhile, the battles go on. In Altona, Manitoba, after parent protest, the teachers who had displayed the Ally cards in their classrooms were ordered to remove the Ally language and leave only the word Ally in a rainbow flag. This was still unacceptable, and with the assistance of Culture Guard / Roadkill Radio’s Kari Simpson, parents penned a letter threatening to sue, threatening to post photos and personal information of the teachers who were displaying the signs (and possibly the school board?) to some sort of “report a teacher” website. Says Manitoba parent Wes Martens of the Ally signs:

“…Then they replaced it with a statement that… it’s pretty good, it’s not perfect, but it says ‘As a teacher I am your ally and I support all the children in this classroom’ or something like that it said. We don’t like the word ‘ally’ in there and we’re gonna try and get that removed, but at least this is a major victory to get this, the flag and the Ally card are down.”

Because even the slightest silent implication of support for LGBT kids continues to offend.

This is part of a 3-part series on LGBT-inclusive anti-bullying education, centering around the Day of Silence, which encourages students to take a vow of silence for the day, to bring attention to anti-LGBT bullying and harassment. It occurs on April 20th.

Part 1: When even silence offends: on the 2012 push from the North American far-right to subvert and antagonize Day of Silence participants.and: When even silence “persecutes:” on the ongoing conflicts in Canada, and a new game of declaring “homophobia” a hate word.

Part 2: When even silence can be exploited: on how the far right’s “No Pro Homo” policy has been tried before.and: When even silence “indoctrinates:” on why the failure of “No Pro Homo” doesn’t register as a failure in the mind of the far right.

Every year, the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network (GLSEN) sponsors the Day of Silence and encourages students to take a vow of silence for the day, “to bring attention to anti-LGBT name-calling, bullying and harassment.” It occurs on Friday April 20th, this year.

The Day of Silence was started in 1996, at a time when silence was really the only permissible way to protest homophobic and transphobic bullying (and is still the only permissible means of protest in countries like Russia and Singapore, where some youth now mark the Day of Silence). In the past couple of years, a series of suicides drew attention to this kind of bullying. To be clear, bullying is certainly not limited to homophobia and transphobia — the kinds of conflicts kids face can be centered around body weight, lack of acceptable physical strength, pimples, voice, disability, race, mannerisms… just about anything that can be perceived can get singled out to make someone a target, and should not be lost in any discussion on bullying. But biases based on real or perceived sexual orientation and / or gender identity stand out because they’re very often socially sanctioned or at least tacitly tolerated in the don’t-ask-don’t-tell environment of most schools. Consequently, there is energy being made to ensure that they’re included in the overall anti-bullying approach. Continue reading →

THE DEATH OF THE TRANSGENDER UMBRELLA: "If you've traveled anywhere among trans or LGBT blogs in the past year or three, you've inevitably come across an ongoing battle over labels, and particularly "transgender" as an umbrella term. It seems to be a conflict without end, without middle ground and without compromise..."

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The Microaggressions Project in solidarity with #Baltimore, #Ferguson, and #BlackLivesMatter. As we always say here, the micro only matters because of the macro systems of injustice. (Large image link here)

I hate St. Patrick’s Day because of a bad experience I had at about 11 or 12. I was coming back from a concert a few cities over along with my mom and some friends and Ikea was on our way so we stopped because we didn’t have one near us at the time. It was the 17th and i was not wearing green. All through the busy store random people, primarily adults, kept […]

“I don’t get why you’re excluding me like this. I’m Jewish; I know oppression.” - A peer to me (a black male) in the midst of a discussion on discrimination and privilege. He is a white male, the son of two doctors, who went to boarding school and is attending an Ivy League university. I was raised by a waitress mother in the inner city and am attending comm […]